Thx 4 the msg: Assessing the Impact of Texting on Student Engagement and Persistence

Abstract

As colleges and universities strive to increase persistence and aid students in reaching graduation, they are utilizing alternative communication strategies like text messaging. Behavioral economics researchers suggest personalized, regular nudges can help college students make decisions that positively impact their college career and keep them on track for graduation. The current study presents the results of a randomized field experiment where a text messaging program was implemented in a large college at a public university. The intervention utilized a mixture of automated and personalized text messages from academic advisors and allowed for two-way communication between individual students and their major advisor. Mulitvariate analyses revealed the intervention had no impact on university persistence, but it did increase the odds of persisting in the college to the end of the semester, moving the average, overall college persistence rate from 93 to 95%. Effects were concentrated on underclass students, whose persistence rate moved from 87 to 93% at the college level. Underclass students also showed statistically significant university persistence effects, moving from 90 to 95%. Students who received texts but never engaged with the texting program were significantly less likely to request an advising appointment or to apply to be a student ambassador than were students in the control group. More research is needed to understand what motivates a student to engage with the texting software and to identify what the longer-term consequences of using text messaging to communicate with students might be.

Texting as an Advising Communication Tool: A Case Study of Receptivity and Resistance

“…Quantitative data on student engagement with the texting platform and opt-out rates were collected during the spring semester through the texting program’s platform. These data were linked to students’ administrative records and quantitative analyses revealed that students in the treatment group were significantly more likely to persist to the end of the semester than were their otherwise similar counterparts in the control group (Tippetts et al, 2020). A cost analysis was done in conjunction with the intervention that revealed text messaging to be a moderately cost-effective strategy for improving persistence in the college (Zick et al, 2020).…”